auctions Archives - Page 18 of 19

Up, up and away

auctions

Time, for a quick saunter round the Christies results. Which were a mixed bag; some things sold, some things didn’t. Some things sold for way over their estimate (we’ll come to those in a minute), some things for well under. This Fred Taylor, for example, went for £250, despite an estimate of £600-800. So far, so like normal.

Fred Taylor, Cambridge, from Christies vintage poster sale
Fred Taylor, Cambridge, British Railways

But the real shock – and the reason that it’s worth my saying anything at all – was this one.

Daily Herald, McKnight Kauffer, Christies vintage poster sale
McKnight Kauffer, Daily Herald

£32,450, the highest price in the sale, despite being huge. I’m gutted.

I know that sounds unreasonable, but I love this poster. Not only because it’s great (it is) but it was also one of the reasons that I started to appreciate posters in the first place.

Back in the day, it used to hang a little-used back stairwell of the V&A, which ran from the Exhibition Road entrance, past the Twentieth Century Galleries and then up into the Eighteenth Century. I used to go up and down there quite a bit, and I learned to love it. But now I’ll never own it (mind you, at 79 x 60 inches, that’s probably a bit of a blessing).

But that wasn’t the biggest shock. That has to belong to this Edward Wadsworth.

Estimated at £4,000-£6,000, it went for £18,750. Someone must have been chuffed this weekend.

Other than that, it was also good seeing the Edward Bawden and David Gentleman London Transport posters making over £1,000.

Although each lot had been made up with other posters (six more in the case of the Bawden – I wonder which they were). Before the minimum lot requirements, these would almost all have been sold separately; it’s a shame that they’re all bundled up, unseen and unvalued now.

What will be interesting is whether or not more posters pop up at the next Onslows sale at the end of the month as a result. Patrick Bogue has just posted up a teasing page of previews at the moment – so it’s hard to tell. There’s a Stan Krol UN poster that I rather like, and I will post that when some larger images are about, and anything else interesting which turns up in the catalogue.

Take your Pick

auctions

I was going to ignore the second Wallis and Wallis auction of World War Two posters, on the grounds that they mostly illustrate the same truth as the first auction, which is that there were far more bad wartime posters than good ones.

Once again in this auction, pictures of aeroplanes and excerpts from Churchill’s speeches are by far the majority. Posters like this.

There’s perhaps one classic,

And a couple which I quite like for no real good reason.

They’ll all go for a lot of money, though, so who cares what I think.

But then Serena, who had clearly been reading the catalogue more closely than I had, pointed out that lot 588 was quite interesting.

588 2 WWII ATS recruiting posters: “ATS as Signal Operators” 3 operators, one with morse key (51-9700) and “ATS carry the messages”, despatch rider on motor cycle (51-9796); in a sleeve. VGC

To be precise, at least one of them is by Beverley Pick and is rather good.

I’m guessing that the other one is also from the same series, but I can’t find an image of it. Pick also did this one as well.

I rather like the mixed photo-montage and text – Pick did the same sort of thing in these two great posters (apologies for not very good images).

I can find a few other things in the same sort of style, like this wartime one whose point I can’t entirely grasp.

And a few other things which are entirely different.

Then that’s about your lot. I think that, after the war, Pick concentrated on exhibition and industrial design rather than posters, including parts of Britain Can Make It and the Festival of Britain, and I ought to do some more research when I am less pressed for time. More on this later then, and thanks again to Serena for flagging the poster up.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world of auctions, this Abram Games has come up on eBay.

It’s lovely, it’s backed on linen, I’ve never seen it before, but it is still eye-wateringly expensive at $1,700 Buy It Now. You can make a best offer, though; perhaps I will go for £150 and see what they say. There on the other hand, as it’s almost 80″ x 120″, and I don’t have an advertising hoarding to put it up on, perhaps I won’t bother.

Posters, posters everywhere, but not a lot to buy

auctions

Well, it’s here. For the first time under the new rules (which are, as ranted about previously, a minimum lot value of £800) it’s the Christies May vintage poster auction. And, unsurprisingly, it’s not for me any more.

There are lots of cruise posters, some French posters, a fair smattering of Olympic posters, and lots more besides, but very little that I’d actually want to buy.

Perhaps the most interesting one for me is this Hans Unger Safari poster, mainly because I’ve never seen it before

This may also be true for Christies, because they don’t seem to have a date or a publisher for it. Anyone out there with any ideas?

There are also five lots of Lyons teashop prints, which you don’t often see, although I’m not sure whether this is because they don’t often come up, or because they more often make their appearances at Modern British Art sales. This 1947 one by William Scott is probably my favourite,

with Barnett Freedman a close second.

It’s worth noting that not even Barnett Freedman can make himself worth the minimum lot value, and for the estimate of £800-1,200 you get two Freedman prints for your teashop.

A few of the usual suspects are present, like these pair of McKnight Kauffers (estimates £1,000-£1,500 and £2,000-£3,000 respectively)

There is also this Bawden City of London Transport poster (estimate £700-£900)

Interestingly, this comes with six other London Transport posters when I would have thought that it would hold that value perfectly well by itself. I’d also be curious to know whether one of them is its pair poster, as this half is coming up more and more, but you never see the text side for sale. Perhaps I’d better ask Christies.

Further to yesterday’s post, there is also a David Gentleman pair poster,

For your £700-900, you also get its other half and two posters by the very under-rated Sheila Robinson, so a good helping of Englishness to be had there.

From the other side of the Channel, design-wise, this has also appeared.

I wonder if it was lured out by the Antiques Roadshow coverage. The estimate (£3,000-£5,000) is pretty much what they gave, so it will be interesting to see how that does.

In other news, the lot value restrictions haven’t entirely kept out the kitch as this

has an estimate of £600-800 despite being a bit grubby. I’ll be surprised.

And this Carvosso will probably go for at least its £800-£1,200 estimate for its curiosity/ephemera value.

While I admire its attempt to inject glamour into the roll-call of Manchester, Middlesborough, White City, I still don’t like it very much.

This, meanwhile, is just delightful.

It’s by D W Burley but also isn’t dated. But it’s still not £600-£800 worth of nice to me. So I shan’t be bidding.

This post is already far too long, but it’s also my duty to point out, as a grumpy under-bidder, that this Henrion went off on eBay yesterday for a mere £139.

One thing I really miss is knowing who has bought things. In the good old days of eBay, most of the time you’d be able to see who’d beaten you to a poster like this. But now – unless you’re selling it yourself – everyone has a cloak of invisibility which no computer wizardry can pull aside. And with Onslow’s now online rather than in the eccentric Festival-modern hall at Marble Arch, I can’t even go there and see for myself wh0’s won things. There’s no reason why I should know of course, but it’s still annoying.

Advance poster warning

auctions

Today, a couple of odds and ends where nothing is happening yet, but will in due course.

Firstly, the Morphets site is trailing Part Three of the Malcolm Guest collection, which are the 2,000 or so (if my memory serves me correctly) post-1960 posters from the collection. Not as interesting to railway buffs, very interesting to Crownfolio. At the moment they are teasing us with just two tiny jpegs.

I know nothing of either of these posters, so if you can tell me who or what they are, I’ll be very grateful. In the meantime, Mr Crownfolio and I will start saving the pennies for July.

At the other end of the country, Wallis and Wallis are selling some more HMSO posters in early May. I blogged about the last sale, which included some interesting ATS recruiting posters.

Amazingly, those first twenty lots fetched almost £15,000 (full story here), which is fairly mindboggling, given how little these kind of posters used to go for just a few years ago. I also didn’t find them a desperately inspiring bunch either, but I am guessing they appealed more to WW2 collectors than poster/design collectors, so am perhaps not that well-qualified to comment.

The lots on sale in May will come from the same batch, which were apparently saved by a worker at a printing firm when he was asked to throw them out, hence their mint condition, but Wallis and Wallis aren’t giving away too many details yet, apart from the image above. More news as it happens.

It’s Easter, don’t move

auctions

We seem to own a piece of railwayana, how did that happen?

Fortunately, this didn’t end up being as relevant as it might have been this Easter.

But it still has a purpose, as you can also buy its cousin in a few days time in Chertsey. If that makes its estimate of £150-250, there may be another one coming onto the market quite swiftish.

The auctioneers have this down as 1930s, but they’re both published by the Railway Executive Committee, who ran the railways from the start of WW2 in 1939 until nationalisation created British Railways in 1948. And the ‘don’t travel’ message pretty much has to be wartime, I should think.

By way of completeness, here is a third from the National Railway Museum collections.

They’re all by Reginald Mayes, who was staff artist for the London Midland and Scottish Railway before the war and so presumably stayed on to produce a wide range of anti-travel and propaganda posters for the Railway Executive Committee. What’s interesting is that I can’t find any traces of anything he designed for the London Midland, so it looks as if he only started signing things after 1939. If anyone can tell me any more, please do.

In other auction news, Dreweatts in Bristol are selling a second collection of works by Percy Drake Brookshaw, once again being sold by the family of the artist (I blogged about the first sale in February). Some are the same posters,

and quite a few are in the same style as those in the last sale (i.e. with the colour turned up to 11).

But there are also a couple of interesting ones. This 1958 London Transport poster is rather lovely, and you’d get two copies for an estimated price of £50-70, which seems entirely reasonable to me.

Meanwhile the big estimate of £300-400 is on this Summer Shell poster.

The Shell Poster Book tells me that it’s from 1933 (there, incidentally, is an archive that would really benefit the world were it online) so it may well go for more. Happy shopping.

The Shell Guide to auctions

auctions, posters

Not that long ago, I mentioned the Shell Educational posters in passing, with the intention of saying more about them one of these days.

But I’ve been rather pre-empted by the appearance of a whole group of them at auction on Thursday. (At first glance, I thought they were being sold by Alan Partridge Auctioneers, but sadly that isn’t the case).

Dorset Shell educational poster John Nash
Dorset, by John Nash

What’s on offer are four lots of the ‘County’ posters, each with five or six posters in each, all carrying an estimate of £60-100, and all photographed having a bit of a lie down.

Sussex Shell educational posters SR Badmin
Sussex, by SR Badmin

As well as a set of twelve Shell Guides to the countryside by Edith and Rowland Hilder.

Now, with my collectors head on, Shell posters can be very variable. They’re on gloss paper, which yellows and spots and then yellows some more. Plus at top and bottom they have black metal hangers which rust at the first possible opportunity, and also means that you can’t really put them in a frame. Having said all of that, a good one is still a lovely thing to have around the home (David Gentleman’s Ridgeway Path being my ornament of choice). And of course, because they come in sets, they bring out the worst of my collecting impulses.

With my thinking about posters brain engaged, they are interesting, not least because I’ve never seen anything written about them. They’re really a class apart, as almost all the artists who were commissioned are better known as illustrators rather than designers.; there’s more overlap between these posters and Ladybird books than there is with the rest of poster design. But some of them are beautiful, some – mostly by Tristram Hillier who was a surrealist artist when not producing these – are weird and strange, plus they are jolly informational things to have hanging on the wall. About which I will write properly another day.

Should you be interested, you can bid via the-saleroom.com if you don’t fancy the trek to Congleton.